Customer Reviews

Frommer's Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, Eighth Edition

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First, the good news: there is a guide to the low countries, known pre-EU as the Benelux (for Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg). Now the bad news: it's not a very good guide. I should have known from the inaccurate title--Holland (a subset of provinces) is part of the Netherlands (the country), so the names are not synonymous--but I found out the hard way instead.

I chose to bring this one on our recent trip because it meant I wouldn't have to carry more than one book. I almost threw it away mid-trip after discovering that much of the text was out-of-date, misleading, or wrong. I don't mean things like restaurants or museum opening times, because those change frequently, but things that suggest that the author didn't actually verify anything cultural that he wrote about.

For example, the author refers to the Hotel Royale in Luxembourg as "a leading hotel of the world." Not quite--it's a member of the Leading Hotel of the World, Inc. chain. He also says that Luxembourg City is extremely safe (why, it's the safest city in the world!) and that it's open all night. Actually, the bars close at 1 AM and according to several locals, there is tons of petty crime and the "safest city in the world" title was self-anointed. We found numerous examples of innacuracies in the writeups about the Netherlands and Belgium too.

On the other hand, the maps were decent and it did cover many of the smaller towns that we wanted to see, which is primarily why we kept the book.

My advice is to find separate guides for the Netherlands and Belgium/Luxembourg, and get some good maps from the tourism offices.

Leave it to Frommer's to put all the great cities and towns of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in one handy book. This guide offered good maps and suggestions for "best of" experiences. There are separate maps for attractions, hotels and restaurants in each city, all listed by price range. This easy to carry guide came with me everywhere I went and properly lead me to all the best places.